This is a history of power politics from the construction of the German battlefleet to Gorbachevs new thinking. The unwillingness of all the Great Powers to recognize that war, in Ivan Blochs 1899 phrase, had become impossible except at the priceMoreThis is a history of power politics from the construction of the German battlefleet to Gorbachevs new thinking. The unwillingness of all the Great Powers to recognize that war, in Ivan Blochs 1899 phrase, had become impossible except at the price of suicide, resulted in two unprecedentedly great wars.
These in turn gave impetus to a decline of power politics which gathered pace after 1945. Nuclear weapons imposed a straitjacket which Soviet revisionism was unable to break out of. Moral revulsion, technological advance and economic growth facilitated the emergence of a normbased accomodatory culture, which now offers a basis for a wider post-Cold War order.